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LOS ANGELES — In major championship golf, like Los Angeles traffic, it’s the waiting that wears you down.
There’s been a symbiotic relationship between Rory McIlroy and Rickie Fowler that stretches back to the Walker Cup at Royal County Down in 2007, when they were 18, all flowing locks and potential. Both have delivered on that promise, one more than the other.
Fowler’s first PGA Tour victory came in a playoff over McIlroy at the same course where McIlroy had won his maiden title two years earlier. McIlroy’s last major win, the ’14 PGA Championship, came in a twilight nail-biter over Fowler at Valhalla. His first major title – the ’11 U.S. Open – was logged less than four years after he turned professional, so he was never branded as the best golfer without a major, the burdensome millstone that has been draped around the neck of so many. Fowler, almost five months older, has been mentioned in such dispatches on the back of a handful of Tour titles, including the Players Championship.
For McIlroy, three more majors followed in quick succession – two PGA Championships and the older Open – but none since that second Wanamaker Trophy at Valhalla nine years ago. For about half of those 3,234 intervening days, he’s had a sense of how it feels to wear that major-less label. He has four of them, but McIlroy has became known as the best player waiting for another major. And that might be worse than the winless designation.
Being referred to as the best player without a major suggests that one’s best is ahead. To be known as the best player waiting for another implies that the best might well be in the rear view.
McIlroy has done about all he can to dispel that notion since Valhalla: another 14 wins on the PGA Tour with three victories in the season-long FedEx Cup, another four wins in Europe and three season’s best titles there, plus 18 top ten finishes in majors, half of them top fives. That’s several careers worth by most standards, but for all that he is continually judged by what he has not won lately.
Even casual observers noticed a change in McIlroy this week. Outwardly, not much was different. Sure, he skipped a press conference – his reasoning was that he’d said all he wants to on the PGA Tour’s proposed deal with the Saudi Public Investment Fund – but otherwise he was his usual self. But there was also an unmistakable edge of impatience, the air of one who has had just about enough of this crap in the majors.
For someone as competitive as McIlroy, the nine-year quest for a fifth major is wearing enough, but his failure to accomplish it is magnified by the success of others. Brooks Koepka has won five since McIlroy’s fourth. Jordan Spieth has three. Dustin Johnson, Jon Rahm and Justin Thomas have a couple each. So too Collin Morikawa, fresh out of college. For chrissakes, even Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, a generation older and spent forces on paper, have won since ’14.
Perhaps that pointy-elbowed focus this week was born from Koepka winning the PGA Championship last month in the Rochester, New York, hometown of McIlroy’s wife, Erica. Maybe he was unburdened by picking out the shrapnel he took for a Tour that ultimately treated him like a “sacrificial lamb,” in his words. Or it could have been the grouping with Koepka the first two rounds, in which he clipped him by eight shots.
Whatever the motivation, for most the 123rd U.S. Open, McIlroy’s game delivered on it. He wielded his driver like Thor’s hammer to batter L.A.C.C.’s North course into submission. On Sunday, he played what has long been thought an ideal U.S. Open final round – birdie early, then grind out pars. But his putter went tepid, just as it did in the closing round of the Open at St. Andrews last summer, and he was hosed by a lousy break in a bunker on the 14th hole. It was destined to be another crushing Sunday in a major.
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Fowler is McIlroy without the hardware. He has an impeccable reputation and lucrative personal brand, and as a 34-year-old father has outgrown the neon highlighter fashions, even if he hasn’t stopped wearing them. He entered the final round with a share of the lead but leaked oil all day, a series of bogies leaving him a few shots adrift.
McIlroy and Fowler both leave Los Angeles still waiting, one for five, the other for one. Fowler can take more from this U.S. Open than can McIlroy. For the Northern Irishman, it was a golden opportunity that he allowed to slide by. For the Californian, it was an unexpectedly strong performance after four years in the doldrums. On days like this, small victories can bring consolation.
From Los Angeles Country Club, it’s six miles east to Hollywood, and about another 5,000 and change east to Holywood Golf Club outside Belfast, where McIlroy grew up. The road he has traveled between those two points was once as smooth and thrilling as an autobahn. In recent years, it has felt more like a country lane, full of unexpected turns and jolting potholes. The next stop on his road is Royal Liverpool, the site of his third major win nine years ago. It will be another reminder of the player he was, and that he will be again. Just wait.